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City Trying Again to Revive Brooklyn Freight Railyard

After spending $20 million in a failed effort to revive a sprawling freight yard on the Brooklyn waterfront, the city is again trying to put the site to use, this time by dividing it into two parts and seeking different companies to operate each part.

The previous effort involved leasing the entire 33-acre site -- the 65th Street Railyard in Bay Ridge -- to one company, the Canadian Pacific Railway, three years ago. But Canadian Pacific found only one company to ship freight there on a long-term basis and, cutting its losses, the railroad pulled out of the yard in August, six months before its lease was to expire.

Dividing the yard into 18-acre and 15-acre segments, the city's Economic Development Corporation said, could attract more operators -- maritime companies as well as railroads -- than keeping the site intact. The city had previously focused its search for a yard operator only on rail freight companies.

The effort to revive the city-owned yard comes at a time when the Port of New York is again thriving, after falling into a deep slump after World War II. And it is occurring as the Bloomberg administration strives to rejuvenate the Brooklyn waterfront.

In the new effort to resuscitate the 65th Street yard, companies are being asked to submit proposals to operate the 15-acre northern portion of the site. As for the 18-acre southern portion, a railroad company will be sought for that portion, a spokeswoman for the Economic Development Corporation, Janel Patterson, said last week. She said the agency was working with the New York & Atlantic, which runs freight service on Long Island Rail Road tracks.

If a maritime company took over the northern portion, Ms. Patterson said, it could use barges to bring in freight that could be transferred to rail cars at the yard.

But because the yard lacks docks, any company chosen would have to pay to have them built, at an estimated cost of nearly $4 million, Ms. Patterson said.

The yard's $20 million rehabilitation in the 1990's included the installation of equipment for transferring rail cars already loaded with cargo to or from barges, which would have floated the cars between the yard and a similar yard in Jersey City.

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When the Giuliani administration announced in 2000 that the city and state had spent $20 million to rehabilitate the yard -- which fell into disuse after a wave of railroad bankruptcies in the 1960's and 70's -- it emphasized that besides freight transfers between rail cars and trucks, the site could have been used for floating loaded rail cars across the harbor.

Float operations here were once widespread, but they are now rare, with a single company, New York Cross Harbor Railroad, operating elsewhere on the Brooklyn waterfront. The new float equipment at 65th Street has never been used.

Canadian Pacific has said it never wanted to use it. It said its plan to use the yard for transferring freight between rail cars and trucks failed because even though the railroad pushed a marketing plan, it was unable to attract the business it had expected. Officials at the Economic Development Corporation insist that a reorganization within Canadian Pacific after it leased the yard reduced its efforts to market the plan.

Under the new approach for the site, the future of the gantry-like float equipment remains uncertain. It is situated in the southern section. The present search "is not about the float barges," Ms. Patterson said, though she added that the city had not given up on using the float facilities. "We're just not dealing with them today," she said.

New York & Atlantic, which operates in Brooklyn and Queens and on Long Island, was a subcontractor to Canadian Pacific in the yard, handling switching and other activities. It has continued working in the yard after Canadian Pacific pulled out, serving the lone company that Canadian Pacific had attracted -- a brick company that provides a "small volume of business" at the yard, said Bruce Lieberman, chairman of New York & Atlantic.

Mr. Lieberman said his company was interested in operating the entire yard but had not decided whether to make a bid to operate just the northern section.

The New York Cross Harbor Railroad has said it is interested in moving its float operation to the 65th Street yard from its current Brooklyn location at 51st Street, which it says has "antiquated facilities." But Donald B. Hutton, the executive vice president of Cross Harbor's parent company, the New York Regional Rail Corporation, said he needed to study the bid request for the northern area "to see if we would respond." His company's main interest, he said, was the car-float equipment in the southern area.